Book Review: Slightly Peculiar Love Stories

 
(Disclaimer: Slightly Peculiar Love Stories includes my story "Said Sheree", which I have not attempted to review!)

Slightly Peculiar Love Stories is the second book, and first short story collection, published by Rosa Mira Books, the new New Zealand publishing house set up by Dunedin author Penelope Todd earlier this year. I was honoured to have a story included in the collection, and have blogged about that previously.

There are a couple of things that should attract any reader to Slightly Peculiar Love Stories. One is that really cool cover. Another is the really rather extraordinary range of New Zealand and international authors who have contributed new or reprinted stories to this anthology:

• From New Zealand, we have Craig Cliff, Sue Wootton, Janis Freegard, Tina Makereti, Bryan Walpert, Coral Atkinson, Claire Beynon, Latika Vasil, Linda Niccol, Maxine Alterio, Susannah Poole, and Tim Jones.
• International authors include Alex Epstein (Israel), Angelo R. Lacuesta (Philippines), Brenda Sue Cowley (USA), Christos Chrissopoulos (Greece), Elena Bossi (Argentina), Lawrence K. L. Pun (Hong Kong), Salman Masalha (Israel), and Tania Hershman (UK).

That's quite the lineup, but the proof of any short story collection is in the reading. The good news is that there is a lot of good reading here, and a lot of different takes on love. My favourites at the moment include:

• The sets of short-short stories by Alex Epstein and by Tania Hershman (four apiece)
• Janis Freegard's ingenious and moving "Mill", which won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award in 2001
• Elena Bossi's lovely and poignant "The Ache"
• Claire Beynon's magical "Trapeze Artist"
• Angelo R. Lacuesta's "Space Oddity"

- but there are so many other good stories here that I imagine your favourites will differ from mine.

There's something I haven't mentioned about Slightly Peculiar Love Stories: it's an ebook. The good news is, you don't need an ebook reader to read it. I read it on my computer in PDF format, and (as a person who doesn't generally like to read large amounts of text on-screen) I found it easy and enjoyable to read. The fonts are crisp and the layout clear.

So, if you don't have an ebook reader, don't let that put you off. Slightly Peculiar Love Stories is easy to read on a computer screen, and more to the point, it is well worth reading, because there is a lot of good fiction in here.